This is all a brilliant sexual metaphor.

Rosalie Preuss, the school nurse, said that when she heard Ms. O’Keefe’s announcement she raced to the door of the infirmary, and was met face-to-face with the bloodied buck.

What happened next amazed her.

“When he saw me, he started climbing in,” Ms. Preuss said. “I thought he’d back up, but he started coming forward, so I shut the door and went, ‘Eek! Eek!’”

The buck, a large, four-point antlered adult, took about a 10-minute tour through the front lobby, the nurse’s office and the teachers’ lounge. It struggled to run and mostly slid over the school’s bloodied terrazzo flooring, Ms. O’Keefe said.

She said the deer did not try to attack anyone. Indeed, she said, it seemed to be “afraid and a little bit disoriented.”